Title: Record of a Night Too Brief
Author: Hiromi Kawakami
Translator: Lucy North
Published by: Pushkin Press
My rating: 5 out of 5 stars
Where I got the book: Public Library
Cotent Warning: sexual assault
“In these three haunting and lyrical stories, three young women experience unsettling loss and romance. In a dreamlike adventure, one woman travels through an apparently unending night with a porcelain girlfriend, mist-monsters and villainous monkeys; a sister mourns her invisible brother whom only she can still see, while the rest of her family welcome his would-be wife into their home; and an accident with a snake leads a shop girl to discover the snake-families everyone else seems to be concealing.” (Source)
The Briefcase was one of the first books I read in 2017 and so I feel it’s only fitting to end the year with another novel by Hiromi Kawakami. Record of a Night Too Brief is Kawakami’s most recently translated novel, having been published earlier this year by Pushkin Press.
Record of a Night Too Brief is a fever dream. I can barely describe or remember this book but I need to, want to go back to it. Mushrooms grow on people’s skin, people transform into trees, snakes transform into women and insist on being your mother despite your mother being well and alive in another city, family members disappear, people shrink. These three stories are an incredible blend of the sublime, the magical and the absurd, all taken at face value as you fall head over heels into the book.
Like in The Briefcase, Kawakami’s prose is beautifully light yet deeply draws you in. I liken it to floating in a fog, everything is weightless yet claustrophobic and obscured. Record of a Night Too Brief is a fantastic way to end 2017 and a new favourite. I so desperately want to read it again or listen to an audiobook version (of which I don’t think there is one). Kawakami is now one of my go to authors of Japanese fiction and I can’t wait to pick up another of her books.
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